Choice Hotels – Building an AI Growth Stack for Franchisees

Choice Hotels is applying AI across more of the hotel customer journey, from discovery and group sales to pricing, reviews and property operations. Its latest results suggest the company sees these tools as part of a connected commercial system designed to generate demand while improving franchisee economics.

The strategy arrives as Choice works to restore domestic unit growth. The company’s U.S. room count was approximately flat year over year in the third quarter, but room exits declined 23%. U.S. openings increased 17% during the first nine months of 2026, while the conversion pipeline grew 29%. Choice also reported a 3.8% increase in U.S. revenue per available room, driven by gains in both occupancy and rates.

Those figures do not prove that AI produced the improvement. They do, however, provide the commercial context for Choice’s technology investments. The company is using AI to help individual hotels become easier to discover, convert more demand and operate more efficiently—all of which can affect whether owners remain with the system or add another Choice Hotels property.

Preparing Hotels for AI Discovery

Choice says visits to ChoiceHotels.com originating directly from large language models increased more than tenfold year over year during the quarter. The volume remains a small percentage of total website traffic, but the increase supports the company’s decision to enrich its digital property content as travelers begin using AI assistants to research accommodations.

For a hotel franchise, visibility in AI search depends on more than the strength of the national brand. An assistant needs reliable information about each property’s location, amenities, room types, availability and nearby attractions. Incomplete or inconsistent property content can make an otherwise relevant hotel difficult for an AI platform to recommend.

Choice’s response resembles local-search optimization, but for a discovery environment that may answer a question without sending the traveler to a conventional results page. The company is attempting to make its property information understandable to those systems while preserving a path to direct booking.

The risk is that more AI visibility does not necessarily give Choice Hotels greater control of the traveler. An assistant may recommend a hotel but direct the booking through an online travel agency or another intermediary. Choice will need to measure not only referrals from large language models, but also whether those interactions produce direct bookings, loyalty enrollments and profitable stays.

Connecting Discovery Conversion

Choice is also applying AI further down the funnel. Its EasyBid platform helps hotel owners respond to requests for group business, a category that can be particularly valuable to properties serving corporate travel, sports teams and local events. Management said the tool improved request-for-proposal win rates by 210 basis points and supported a 27% increase in group revenue during the quarter.

That is a more concrete use of AI than adding a chatbot to a customer-facing website. EasyBid is intended to help an individual hotel evaluate and convert demand it might otherwise miss, connecting centralized technology with location-level revenue.

Choice is taking a similar approach to pricing. Its RAIZ revenue-management platform combines pricing, inventory and channel management, giving franchisees a way to adjust rates without relying entirely on manual decisions. Meanwhile, an AI-assisted reputation-management tool reportedly reduced related franchisee fees by approximately 30%. Choice is also expanding Charlie, an AI tool within its property-management system that handles routine operating tasks.

Together, the products cover several parts of a hotel’s commercial operation: attracting demand, responding to leads, setting prices, managing reviews and reducing administrative work. The value comes from how those functions reinforce one another, not simply from the number of AI products deployed.

Loyalty Remains the Connective Layer

Choice Privileges gives the company a way to identify travelers after discovery and engage them across its portfolio. The program reached 78 million members, an increase of 7%, while loyalty members’ share of revenue rose by more than 140 basis points. Choice also said new members generated 12% more revenue per person than comparable members added a year earlier.

That first-party relationship becomes more valuable as discovery fragments across AI assistants, online travel agencies, search engines and travel platforms. Choice Hotels may not control where a traveler begins planning, but loyalty can give it a stronger role in subsequent bookings and provide the data needed to personalize future offers.

The challenge is making the system work consistently across independently operated hotels. AI-generated demand has limited value if property details are inaccurate, group requests go unanswered, pricing is poorly aligned with local conditions or the guest experience fails to meet expectations. Choice will need common data standards and performance measures while giving owners enough flexibility to respond to their markets.

Choice’s AI strategy is therefore best understood as a franchise growth strategy. Better discovery can introduce travelers to individual hotels; EasyBid and RAIZ can help properties convert and price that demand, reputation tools can strengthen local credibility, and loyalty can turn a single stay into an ongoing customer relationship. The longer-term measure is not how many AI products Choice Hotels deploys. It will be whether individual hotels attract more profitable bookings, deliver better guest experiences and give owners a stronger reason to remain and grow within the Choice system